March 14, 2011: Conservative Rock Musician Calls Attorney General a ‘Racist Punk’

Rock musician Ted Nugent, an outspoken conservative, calls Attorney General Eric Holder a “racist punk” in a Washington Times column. Holder is African-American. Nugent is writing in response to Holder’s recent request that the city of Dayton, Ohio, lower the passing threshold on the test to become a police officer because not enough black recruits passed the exam. Nugent does not inform his readers that the Justice Department originally sued Dayton over the exams in September 2008, while Bush appointee Michael Mukasey was attorney general, nor that the department settled the lawsuit in February 2009. Instead, Nugent calls the request “yet another ugly, blatant, and defining racist move” for the Obama Justice Department, writing: “Instead of attracting the best and brightest to serve the public, racist Mr. Holder will now ensure that the good residents of Dayton will be protected by dunce cops who score the equivalent of a D or F on the entrance exam.… What Mr. Holder clearly wants by forcing his racist substandards on the good citizens of Dayton is to ensure people he favors get a fair shake at becoming cops by lowering the standards to such a degree that there might as well not be any entrance exams.” Nugent says Holder may invite members of the New Black Panther Party to move to Dayton and become police officers, “where they could then legally intimidate white citizens without fear of reprisal from Mr. Holder’s Department of Injustice. If the citizens complained, he could scold them and call them ‘racial cowards.’” Holder wants to stuff the Dayton Police Department with “functionally illiterate” blacks, Nugent asserts: “the very bottom of the barrel.” He concludes: “Racism lives, and it lives in the Obama crony administration. How sad.” [Dayton Daily News, 2/17/2011; Washington Times, 3/14/2011; Media Matters, 3/15/2011] In 2007, Nugent invited then-Senator Barack Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate, and another senator, Barbara Boxer (D-CA), to “suck on my machine gun,” called Obama a “piece of s_hit,” called Senator Hillary Clinton (D-IL), another Democratic presidential contender, a “worthless b_tch,” and called Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) a “worthless wh_re” (see August 21-24, 2007).